...there are in cities men who hate the people (demos), and if ever the lot falls to them they will destroy the people (demos). But the people itself ought to keep watch and elect all those who are well-disposed towards itself, and ought to choose as its army-commanders those who are suitable for the job, and to choose others to serve as guardians of the law, and so on.

—anonymous Greek sophist, author of the Dissoi Logoi

In the wake of 9/11/2001, the Indiana legislature passed a bill requiring that public schools re-institute a time-honored practice that many of us remember from our youth: of standing every morning, saluting the flag, and pledging allegiance both to it "and to the Republic for which it stands." Starting with the 2005-06 school year, the day has begun with the principal's or his representative's directing of the pledge, and immediately following that a carefully non-denominational "moment of silence." This is a conservative community, where student-initiated Christian prayers are still the norm at commencement exercises every spring. No one, as far as I know, has voiced the slightest concern about this new State-sanctioned practice; nor has any student, so far as I am aware, hesitated (at least on the basis of any contrary principle of conscience) to stand with reverence while the generality of that body perform the ritual devotion.

Among faculty, in the first days of the Fall 2005 term, I only heard expressions of gladness and praise for the practice, praise tinged with a hope (however faint) that it might go some way to restoring traditional discipline—reminding the less grounded of this present generation of public-school students that some things are sacred. And far be it from me to disagree with the nobler intentions behind such legislative initiatives. Indeed, what harm can this one do? What could be more sensible and innocuous than for a people to continually remind itself, through its most cherished institutions of State, Church, and School, of their common and uniting allegiances? Certainly there is a good deal to be said for the practice. As President Lincoln put it: "United we stand, divided we fall."

Yet, "on the other hand..." (as good Tevye so often deliberates in Fiddler on the Roof). And the fact is, as anyone caught between two or more versions of Truth comes to know, there are many "other hands"—potentially, at least, as many as minds to conceive and fight for them. No one has appreciated this fact more than the ancient and oft-maligned Greek sophists, whose most democratic art of rhetoric has been reduced in our Western heritage to such unfortunate pejoratives as "sophistry" and "mere rhetoric," dismissed, by the demagoguery of much that passes in the United States today for public discourse, as self-indulgent and even treasonous speech.

Hence my unease with this latest flurry of public declarations of an ambiguously interpreted patriotism. To whose vision of flag and republic are we pledging ourselves? Likewise, when we cover ourselves with yellow ribbons and constant protestations of support for our troops, to whose definition of "support" are we publicly understood to commit ourselves? In a July 21, 2003 comment in neighboring Evansville’s Courier & Press, I supported our troops by worrying about the several young women from Perry Central High who were financing their future educations by becoming "traveling soldiers," as the Dixie Chicks might have put it, and by worrying about what message my young students were getting from the popular rush at the time to pillory those Southern songsters for daring (despite that pointedly troop-friendly song) to question our President's latest war. Yet to at least one outraged reader, my version of support was insipid and unpatriotic, a grave insult to the courage and moral fiber of those young soldiers of both sexes who were willing to sacrifice all, if necessary, for the freedoms I thoughtlessly enjoyed.

The point is not whether I or the Dixie Chicks are right about the inadvisability of the ongoing Iraq phase in the President’s potentially unending war against the enemies of freedom, but the irony of so many efforts to shout us down—to create a climate (in the name of a universal struggle against the enemies of democracy) in which one does not feel safe in exercising the democratic responsibility of a reasoned public discourse and dissent within our own borders. The same people who condemn the totalitarian instincts of a radical Left, which on our college campuses have not always been above shouting down the most reasonably-considered opposition to their own Utopian visions, now egregiously commit the same sin from the halls of their own power and influence. In any case, sexist or thoughtless sentimentalist that I may be, I knew enough when one of those girls came back from Iraq for a period of recuperation, after having been burned in an ambush that killed a number of her fellow soldiers (men and women), to just embrace and wish God's blessings on her, never mind what her own opinions about Bush's war might be. The fact that I denounce the war doesn't mean that I denounce her, or that I fail to admire the courage and faith that by all accounts have distinguished her service as a Marine.

Our quintessential American Henry David Thoreau, in his essay "On the Duty of Civil Disobedience," argues from the moral high ground of his Transcendentalist faith against another American President's war of aggression against Mexico, and he preferred jail to paying his tax in support of that campaign. All Polk’s rhetoric about self-determination aside, it doesn't follow that his war was just, that it wasn't motivated by chiefly un-humanitarian aims. We might still argue with some of Thoreau’s most basic and principled assertions, such as the one (grounded in a frontier ethic of unencumbered individualism) suggesting that the government that serves us best will govern us least—or not at all. The reality that we seem to have inherited, ushered in by those who claim to reduce government’s strangle-hold on our economic lives, is one in which the interests of extreme wealth are most truly unbridled while the unfortunate masses of lesser humanity are subjugated to the operations of a neoliberal global economy that has neither heart nor conscience. This new reality may be touted as an expression of Thoreau's and Emerson's own principle of self-reliance and individual initiative, but clearly the domestic profiteering post-Katrina is not the reality that either of those men contemplated.

But I digress. As Louis Menand points out in The Metaphysical Club (2001), the violence of civil war led us from Emersonian and abolitionist moral absolutes to the more contingent truths of the American Pragmatists—whose practical philosophy of what can be agreed upon (and thus made workable) in a given time and place was not so different from the democratic discourse of the early sophists. The pragmatic rhetorics of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., William James, Charles Sanders Peirce, and John Dewey were almost totally eclipsed, Menand suggests, by the second half of the twentieth century, certainly by the time of the impassioned but often unreasoned rebellions of the '60s. Even Martin Luther King, Jr.'s finely reasoned and essentially pragmatic Civil Rights Movement was based in a conception of absolute and inalienable moral principles which, despite the clarity of Thomas Jefferson's liberationist rhetoric, are never self-evident but must ever be argued. Remember that Jefferson himself was an owner of slaves, as were the great democrats of ancient Athens. If such truths as the inalienable rights to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness"—of both white and black men (and women)—are so clearly evident, how to explain that they have so seldom been recognized in the long course of world history? And how to explain that, at this juncture in our own nation's relatively short history, we are once more compelled to argue for the separation of powers—the checks and balances—of our supremely pragmatic Constitution, protections which our present Administration seems so intent on dismantling?

Let me be clear about one thing: I have no quarrel with the ideals of Martin Luther King's or any comparable movement of non-violent and reasoned resistence to oppression. I do not begrudge the Black Church its moral authority, summoned from an expansive interpretation of Biblical scripture and from the suffering of the African American community itself. I even sympathize with the armed rebellion of Marcos's Zapatista rebels in Mexico's southern state of Chiapas—that revolution which after the brief and largely bloodless skirmishes of its first day, whether by design or by blessed circumstance, quickly became a war of Internet-sped comuniqués and treatises, at once poetic and rational, which spoke so loudly to the national and international communities as to seriously hamper the government’s massive push for the Zapatistas' extermination. What I do argue, in this age of increasingly dangerous and conflicting moral absolutes, backed up by competing threats of apocalyptic destruction, is that the moral imperatives of humanity’s shared responsibility for the least of these our brothers and sisters—regardless of color, creed, or nationality—can and must be argued (first and foremost) pragmatically. As Menand suggests—in paraphrase (as I recall) of the sentiments of Jane Addams, who was so influential in the thought of John Dewey—there are no benefits to be gained in human society that are not mutual: we are never truly protecting our own interests while suppressing the rights and privileges of others. This includes the rights of Palestinian rabbles—and present or potential terrorists—to land and water and dignity. As Barry Lopez suggests recently in a perspicacious environmental essay for the journal Granta, we are foolish to swallow the simplistic argument of the pro-war crowd that our enemies are solely motivated by an innate racial or religious hatred of Western democracy.

None of which is to suggest that those who have argued a more hawkish point of view have never had a leg to stand on—or that such arguments should have been dismissed out of hand. Unquestionably we inhabit a very dangerous world; in the immediate wake of 9/11, it was hard to know how to respond: to not respond at all was certainly unimaginable. But in the oppressive political climate that has followed, the politics of fear that the present Administration cynically enflames at every election cycle, it becomes ever more difficult to enter into substantive discussion of what a strong and informed reaction might be. In the simplified rhetoric of Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld, our only choice is the false dichotomy of perpetual pre-emptive warfare or the cowardly cut-and-run. The result of such an impoverished view of the rhetorical possibilities is that the countless other modes of action are never fully vetted, infinite "other hands" that might have yielded a more enlightened and effective course. Instead, in almost the same breath as his long-delayed admission that Iraq had nothing at all to do with 9/11 (as if he had never claimed it did!), our Great and Unilateral Decider asks us to believe that the conflict in Iraq is essential in the struggle against Al-Qaeda. If it has become so, he disingenuously fails to mention, it is surely at least in part because of the great folly of our decision to invade in the first place. Meanwhile, it is a fait accompli, and the only honorable choice to stay the course: to suggest otherwise, in this view, is the height of disloyalty or even treason.

On the other hand, as suggested by a chapter heading in Carl Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World (1995): “Real Patriots Ask Questions.” To that effect Sagan quotes U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson (1950): “It is not the function of our government to keep the citizen from falling into error; it is the function of the citizen to keep the government from falling into error.” Any one of us can be wrong: as the American Pragmatists teach us, ideas are social constructs; the best ones can only be arrived at by a free interchange of rational and informed discourse. Impassioned discourse is not out of place, so long as it makes room for reason and a free exchange of information. Let's agree to leave aside, for the sake of argument, the details of whatever absolute Truths we may think to be privy to: the undeniable human fact is that there is not presently the remotest possibility of universal agreement on such points; to deny, with Platonic assurance, that the only Truth worth considering is absolute, unarguable, eternal, is to assure our continued demise and ultimate destruction. We must engage, if we are to avoid that fate, in the sophistic (and pragmatic, moral, life-enhancing) practice of dissoi logoi, the informed and open discussion of opposing arguments—lest the better ones be passed over or completely frozen out of consideration.

In the sophists' day, they were much ridiculed by Socrates and Plato in particular, and to a lesser extent by Aristotle, for going about teaching the arts of public discourse (not to mention "wisdom and moral excellence") to the common rung of people—and for their showmanship (not to mention the audacity of taking money for their itinerant services). Even Isocrates, their student and the best-preserved expositor of their basic philosophy, criticized what he took for the flippancy of many practitioners' technique, preferring a more settled and rigorous gathering of evidence, but in any case both he and they did much to destabilize (as suggested by Patricia Bizzell and Bruce Herzberg, in The Rhetorical Tradition, 2nd Edition, 2001) "the unquestioned authority of arguments based on essential qualities"—essential not in the sense of necessary, but of perfectly stable and unerring in substance and nature: beyond dispute.

Socrates and his champion Plato, if you believe I. F. Stone's very persuasive account in The Trial of Socrates (1988), were the most arrogant of aristocrats and anti-democrats, indeed corrupters of youth against the free working out of the legitimate and operational people's State. If you question Stone's account, consider that of Cicero, whose own courageous rhetoric against the encroaching tyranny of the Caesars' Rome was sealed with his blood. Socrates, he writes, robbed the sophists of their proper designation as philosophers, separating "the science of wise thinking from that of elegant speaking, though in reality they are closely linked together." (Rhetoric, as Dr. Thomas M. Rivers of the University of Southern Indiana states in his classes, is at heart a philosophical method.) The fact that Socrates' discourses were "immortally enshrined in the compositions of Plato," Cicero adds, "Socrates himself not having left a single scrap of writing," led to "the undoubtedly absurd and unprofitable and reprehensible severance between the tongue and the brain, leading to our having one set of professors to teach us to think and another to teach us to speak."

"Yet it is important to understand," Dr. Rivers writes in his essay "Antidosis: An Apology for the Art of Rhetoric," that while Plato seems to have prevailed in the long-run of Western history, the sophists were the clear winners in their day. To them, rhetoric was not just a means of conveying a pre-determined metaphysical truth but "a mode of inquiry," a method by which "our communities come to agree on the beliefs and values that we would have within a culture." The crucial problem that American discourse faces today, at a time of increasingly uncompromising challenges from abroad, is that "[i]n a sense, a vast number of American citizens are Platonists, whether they have ever read Plato or not. For too many Americans, language is mostly about communicating truths that are a matter of demonstration, not about shared inquiry and the complexity of persuasion."

Perhaps, when all is said and done, it will be shown that I was wrong to doubt this Administration and its warmongering. In trying to convince you otherwise, I have in this essay even resorted to the occasional "rhetorical flourish," the heavy-handedness (for instance) of the word "warmongering," and the sarcastic "Great and Unilateral Decider." You who read this should certainly be wary of anyone whose argument relies only (or even primarily) on such tactics, though otherwise they are appropriate tools in the good rhetor’s arsenal, as the likes of Cicero and Isocrates (and even Plato!) can scarcely deny. Examine the rhetoric of the warmongerers, though, and ask yourself if their rhetoric ever completely rises above the level of name-calling, political smears, and artless dodges and deceptions. Eric Alterman, in the September 18, 2006 issue of The Nation, gives a pertinent example in the continued trashing (by the likes of Ann Coulter and Robert Novak) of deceased political-journalistic and "sophistic" firebrand I. F. Stone as a "paid Soviet agent"—an accusation so thoroughly discredited that their continued insistence on it suggests that they are either lying or shamefully (and inexcusably) ill-informed.

Alterman sums it up in this way: "It may be true, as Stone said, that 'all governments lie,' but democracy cannot function if journalists do too. This is why the success of liars like Novak and Coulter at the center of our political culture is a greater danger to America than a truck full of terrorists bent on doing us harm." And this is why I do not believe that I’m wrong in preferring the sometimes tedious, drawn-out, frustrating workings of rhetoric and diplomacy to the knee-jerk patriotism of an unbending military solution, ambiguously pledged allegiances, and the uncritical art of wrapping political dogma in the red-white-and-blue. In the face of lingering chaos in both Iraq and Afghanistan, of the increasing intractibility of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, of looming nuclear conflicts with Iran and North Korea, of increasing international frustration with our policies, our flair for unilateralism and the double standard, I think I might be excused for doubting that the choice of force and more force is ever going to yield the illusory carrot of security that this Administration so cynically holds out to the American demos.

[Brett Alan Sanders]